Local lockdown in Germany after outbreak at meat plant

German authorities on Tuesday slapped new lockdown measures on a western region that has had a surge of coronavirus infections linked to a slaughterhouse, trying to make sure the cluster doesn't fuel a wider contamination in the community.

More than 1,550 people have tested positive for coronavirus at the Toennies slaughterhouse in Rheda-Wiedenbrueck and thousands more workers and family members have been put under a quarantine to try to halt the outbreak.

The company has blamed its workforce, which is made up of mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe, for bringing the virus in while union officials say the outbreak is due to the terrible working and living conditions employees faced under loosely regulated sub-contractors.

The governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state, Armin Laschet, said people in Guetersloh and parts of a neighboring county for the next week will face the same kind of restrictions that existed across Germany during the early stages of the pandemic in March and April.

These include limiting the number of people who can meet in public to those from a single household or two people from separate households, Laschet said.

"We will order a lockdown for the whole of Guetersloh county," he told reporters Tuesday. "The purpose is to calm the situation, to expand testing to establish whether or not the virus has spread beyond the employees of Toennies in the population." "We will get a better picture of the situation through intensive testing, and can then see more clearly within seven days what the situation is," Laschet said.

Over 1,550 people have tested positive for coronavirus at the Toennies slaughterhouse in Rheda-Wiedenbrueck and thousands more workers and family members have been put under a quarantine to halt the outbreak